Welcome to The Panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan:And I'm Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosy.com, and I'm your host for the day.
Justin:Nice. Charge.
Brian Casel:Well, let's go.
Justin:I I gave you I
Jordan:gave you warning. I don't think it was necessary. That's not really a warning.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You made me nervous.
Jordan:I was feeling my power, you know?
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I'll What were people in chat responded to that? Because I sent it out in the email. I was like, it's time for discipline.
Brian Casel:We're gonna get a Stern Talking To from Jordan Gal.
Justin:Yeah. We're gonna get we're gonna get talking to.
Brian Casel:Unlikely. Well,
Jordan:thank you everyone for joining us. We are gonna get into a few topics. We're gonna talk about marketing not working anymore. We're gonna talk about overcomplicating things, which is in the air these days. Yep.
Jordan:There's overcomplication. It's okay. We'll we'll get into that. And why don't we start? This is the big theme that's in on my mind when we chatted briefly before recording.
Jordan:Seems to be on your mind also. Summer's coming to an end. Mhmm. And summer definitely changes our day to day. All three of us have kids.
Jordan:The schedule changes, your day
Justin:to day
Jordan:changes, stress, the number of vacations, and so on. This week for me has been different because Rock and Jess, basically my fellow, like, leaders in the company are both on vacation. I was not and I felt like a sucker. So I decided what the right thing for me to do was to just turn down the temperature or the speed on the week and just kind of enjoy a nice casual week.
Justin:Nice.
Jordan:And and that meant a lot of walks. It's been beautiful here in Chicago. I live right by the lake. So I've been taking big walks. And so what I wanna ask the two of you is summer ending and the fall beginning September, like, we make this turn.
Jordan:It's like the last lap. Mhmm. Home stretch between September and December feels like a beeline of, like, you gotta get rolling, you gotta get things done, you gotta accomplish what you want because Yeah. Next thing you know, it's Thanksgiving, and then next thing you know, it's the holidays and the year's over.
Justin:Yeah. For for me, I think one weird thing is that the introduction of Fable really augmented my pace. Remember? Was like, oh, Fable deadlines coming up. I'm going to build a bunch of stuff.
Justin:And I got into this building mindset. And in May, we announced this video podcast hosting beta for Transistor. And so for the team at Transistor and for me personally, I'm just I've the whole summer, I felt like even with vacations and trips, I just felt like I was up here. But now we're transitioning into my youngest is going back to school. And I just it felt like it just went up a notch for me.
Justin:And I'm just feeling this, like, so much pent up energy of like, let's get going. I want to move. I want to I want to get some stuff shipped. I want us to be making progress. And yeah.
Justin:So I think a similar thing, you know, people we had someone on our team move houses. Actually, two people move houses. We had people take vacation. One of our one of our Michael, he drove all the way up to Dawson City in the in the in the Yukon. So it's wait, is Dawson City in the Yukon?
Justin:I now my
Jordan:geography is but anyway, up north. Very far North Canada.
Justin:So I am feeling like, okay, we're back. Everyone's back. It's time. So when you mentioned it before the call, I was like, man, it's true. I just feel that as you transition out of summer, it's like, okay, happy hour time is done.
Justin:Like, it it's time to build.
Brian Casel:Aside from the calendar, is there Justin, is there anything like, I don't know, like metrics wise or like tangible that's like that that motivates you? That like you look at something and you're just like, that is not where I want it to be. And that is what fires me up to get going on something. Like, there anything like that?
Justin:There's so many things, so many factors. One big factor is we had this summer intern. And he was hungry. Like, he came in in May and he was just like, I am going this is a great opportunity. I'm going to deliver.
Justin:And he just was every single day at work over he just went above and beyond what we could have ever wanted. He set the bar very high for anyone who's gonna follow him.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Justin:And that energy of having this young guy in his twenties just going after it, it was infectious for me. It it rubs off on me. It's just like, oh, like, I can feel his motivation and it infects me. So all summer, I've been feeling that. And now he's going back to school.
Justin:And I'm just kind of still sitting with that energy of want to keep this going.
Jordan:Did it infect the rest of your team?
Justin:Yeah. I mean, not maybe different in different ways. I mean, you can't not be affected by it. That youthful energy and enthusiasm. And he was also some some young people are a little bit more shy and maybe might kind of recede a little bit in meetings or whatever.
Justin:He just felt fully comfortable to, like, question us to interact. Wow.
Brian Casel:It it was awesome very thing. Like like, if you think about, like, in sports, like, the best player on the court makes their teammates better. Mhmm. You know? Like like, they just they they make everyone else want to buy in and want to, know, raise their game.
Brian Casel:And that's that's where you get, like, an MVP type type player.
Justin:And if you have a rookie coming coming in and they've got
Brian Casel:That too.
Justin:Work work ethic up here and all the vets are down here, it's like, hey. Like, are we gonna let this whippers like, let's augment our game too. This is an opportunity, you know?
Brian Casel:Yeah. My so just yesterday, I got back from we we took a road trip. We always do, like, an end of summer road trip the week before the girls go back to school. So we drove up to the coast, in Maine. And, you know, we always try to get one road trip on you know, hotel on a beach.
Brian Casel:The only goal is, like, we wanna be able to step out of the hotel and be on the beach for a couple days.
Justin:And Nice.
Brian Casel:We definitely achieved that. You know, something about walking for a couple miles on the beach every day alone with with my voice notes
Jordan:just really
Brian Casel:gets me into that strategic thinking. Yeah. I I do this a lot day to day anyway. Like, I do daily walks around here as part of my, you know, exercise routine. And I and then I sometimes do like like voice note journals, but something about being on vacation, especially these summer vacations.
Brian Casel:And I think also for the calendar wise right now, somewhere around now is the one year anniversary of Builder Methods.
Justin:Oh, wow.
Brian Casel:I don't know the exact date, but I know that I I know that the subscriptions for Builder Methods Pro began in September 2025.
Jordan:You got renewals coming up.
Brian Casel:So, yeah, the first round of renewals are coming up. That's that's been on my mind a lot.
Justin:AI overview in Google says September 2025.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That that's the subscription. I probably started the business around June or July, but so, yeah. The the so, you know, one year in, and I'm on this vacation, and I'm walking. I was joking with with Amy, like, I walked too far.
Brian Casel:Now I gotta walk back. Like, that that happened to me two days in a row. Don't pick me up. And and so, yeah, I'm I'm just out there. And, you know, what it forces me to do, I don't know about you guys, but like it I really go deep on on the hard questions.
Brian Casel:I'm always thinking whenever I'm thinking strategically planning, what fires me up the most is thinking about the things that I'm most dissatisfied with. And that usually falls into one of a couple different buckets. One is like the overall metrics of the business. One is, like, my personal energy as a founder and, you know, where my head is at creatively and enjoying this thing and and where I want like, what where my gut wants to take this next. And I'm always thinking about, like, what are the big rocks that I need to fix or change or course correct or adjust?
Brian Casel:So I came away with, two two big ones. I'm I'm not gonna spend too much microphone time on it here. We we can later if you guys want to, but one is is big picture around, yeah, like, focus of of, like, the business model and and the product shape of of what Builder Methods and my portfolio will look like going forward. And then the other one is just, like, my operating system, really giving that a a complete overhaul. And I and I literally started working on that big time this week, heavy into using bots and cloud agents.
Brian Casel:We can get into the technical stuff on that, but, like, overarching thing is, like, I actually verbalized a goal for the next couple of years is, like, get to 1,000,000 a year in revenue with a single employee. Single employee, me. You know, one
Justin:person A in
Jordan:KPI, baby. Yep. And and that's
Brian Casel:that's like the driving force. I I've got other stuff around, like, mission of what I'm, everything is is serving a certain particular mission. I can verbalize that. But I did make some, like, tactical changes around, like, what types of products I'm gonna be focused on going forward. And and also marketing and growth, some some some new ideas.
Brian Casel:We can talk, when we get to the marketing stuff, I wanna talk more about that. So, yeah, lots of stuff to dig into.
Justin:Dude, a million dollars in take home a year, that would be
Jordan:Dream. Fantastic.
Justin:That's the dream. Yep.
Brian Casel:Yep. It's a beautiful thing.
Jordan:It's it's possible these days. And I think having the number as a goal is very helpful because you can work backwards from it.
Brian Casel:Exactly. Mhmm.
Jordan:Yeah. And and you can think about the business model, and the price point, and the number of people, and then kinda gauge. Does that sound right? Does that sound realistic?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I do a lot of these types of like strategic, like chats with with whatever chatbot I'm using. And so that is a framing tool that I can say like, my goal is a million in annual revenue, one person company, help me map out the next twelve months, the next twenty four months, next thirty six months. How do we get from here to there? And you know, like it's also like, I'm one year into Builder Methods and it, I've said this before, but like, I don't think that the final shape of Builder Methods is settled yet.
Brian Casel:Like, I don't think the final product is- Only a year. It's only a year in and it's not the type of business, unlike other ones where it started with a very specific product and then I built a business around it. This is more like I built a brand and I've been exploring what the product should ultimately be. And I don't think that's settled yet.
Jordan:Yeah. You you you started to touch on this, like, issue that I think all three of us deal with, where you do wanna hurry up. You you have that urgency. Right? You had a little fire lit under you, Justin, with the intern or just in general where the company is and this new opportunity around video.
Jordan:And you want the urgency, and you also know it's gonna take a while. And going back and forth from those two is a trip. I I tweeted about it, actually.
Brian Casel:I saw that.
Jordan:Yeah. I I think I wrote a tweet. That was that is my honest mind frame. When I take my walk and I'm thinking about it, I'm like, I want the big ass number. And then as you start to kind of come at that goal from different angles, how do I get there?
Jordan:It is a tough realization. And you're like, well, kind of on the right track. Mhmm. And it's just gonna take a while.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And and that's just it. It's just it's just gonna take a while. So this this urgency, but patient.
Justin:It's like
Jordan:patient urgency? I don't even know that. And that's an oxymoron, but that that's actually how we have to live.
Brian Casel:Is there anything you can be more specific around, like, where your mind was at behind that tweet or or what came out of it? Like like, what do you see as the ideal path or the fastest path to achieving that? And how and what is the time frame that you're hoping to like, is it is it an exit? Is it is it just growing? Like like, what?
Jordan:Well, if if I'm being honest, which I can be on this podcast and in this chat and all that, I don't care about a 100.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:A hundred's a nice round number. No one really needs a 100.
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:You need 20 is kind of freedom. Complete freedom.
Justin:Yeah. Mhmm.
Jordan:Arguably, 10 is also freedom but, you know, let's just call it something in that 20 range.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And so, yeah, that that that's what I think about. How am I gonna get there? How do I get there? Okay. Cool.
Jordan:You know, I I have no complaints. I got a nice situation, happy family, happy marriage, like, okay. Okay. Let's let's not let's not catastrophize anything that doesn't warrant it. And and for me, the way I look at it, my oldest daughter is 14.
Jordan:And I use that time frame of her leaving for college as a bit of like a it's not a deadline, but it's just a marker for me to think, like, I would really like to send her off to college and not be very stressed about the expense of that. Because my my my daughters have three, and it's two years apart. So it's two years, two years, two years. Yeah. So that that that's an onslaught.
Jordan:That is Mhmm. Right. Freshman year, one year break, then another with two in college, then a year break, and then another with two in college at the same time. So it is like a it it is it's pretty intense in terms of just the raw expenses of college. Yeah.
Jordan:So I I try to use that, like, alright. I got, like, four years. Okay. It's not it doesn't need to happen overnight. Need to happen in six months.
Jordan:But if I am going to think about it properly, which I have thought too short term in my career way too often. And if I ease off that and and try to find a bit of wisdom to think, you know, everything takes years. Anything good. Even if you start something new today, the realistic expectation, if you want something good with a big number like that attached, it's years. It's multiple years.
Jordan:You might get lucky, flash in the pan, hallelujah, good for you. But that's not the norm and that's not what you should count on.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And so in that case, I you know, like you, Brian, I'm like, okay. How do I work backwards on this? Like, what needs to happen? So when I look at Rosie, for example, I say, you know, few million bucks in ARR. Where does it need to be in ARR for my portion of an exit to be that kind of a number, that meaningful outcome.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:And it's it's a few years. If we do great and we get the 10,000,000 ARR in like two years from now, that's that's amazing. And that would be real success in terms of growth accelerating, not just linear, all this other stuff. And that helps me bring things back to what needs to happen this week, this month, with enough urgency to think, well, if you wanna get there in two years, it's not that much time. Mhmm.
Jordan:Right? It's effectively that I'm halfway in. Because it's been two years. Right? We launched our first paying customer in September '24.
Jordan:So two years ago.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:And I'm happy with where we are right now, but to get to where I wanna be in two years, we have to go faster. So there is a sense of urgency. Now, in many ways, it's easier to grow and build speed with something that's already up and running with a few thousand customers than it is from from a zero start when you're just launching something.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:Yeah. What I bring into this is I had to over the last month, I had to really, like, shake up the extra sketch in my mindset. Because sixty days ago, I was like, how do I make sure there's enough cash in the bank until we get profitable? Yeah. And now that there's a bunch of cash in the bank, I I I can't think the same way.
Jordan:Like, it's almost understandable that I had this sense of relief and a little bit of relaxation that came with it. But then when you look at it rationally, you're like, no. I actually should not be relaxed. I should be actually be more aggressive than I was. Mhmm.
Jordan:So all that just helps on on these walks where you're like, oh, I just want this. And then you kinda have to make it happen, so you gotta find the steps.
Justin:I just love that idea of patient urgency. I just wanna point that point that out. Patient urgency, Jordan, that's gotta be a blog post that I think emphasizes the tension tense. Almost It is.
Jordan:I I tell my wife, I get I feel like I get the heebie jeebies. I'm like, but I wanna go faster, but I can't, but I I have to go slow at the same time,
Justin:but I'm like, oh,
Jordan:I wanna rip, you know.
Brian Casel:And and and also, like, the hardest thing is to deal with the day to day roller coaster, emotional roller coaster of, this is go like, literally this week, I had, three days of, like, pretty low sales, and my head is just catastrophizing every And then followed by two days of solid sales. It's like, okay, we're we're fine. Know, but like But then, you know, so like that roller coaster, when when you've already made a pretty solid strategic plan for the next twelve, twenty four, thirty six months that you wanna commit to.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But but but somehow yesterday and today are convincing you otherwise. Like, that that is just really hard to keep to, you know, I I've been through enough of these cycles in in my career that that, like, I could intentionally, like, block out the emotional noise, but it's there. It doesn't go Yep.
Jordan:For me too. I and and I try we laugh about it, Rock and I, because both of us are so, you know, active in Slack. We're we're watching every sign up. Rock is, like I mentioned, Gandalf, that you shall not pass. And and 10 times a day, he is blocking people who are clearly just trying to copy the product.
Jordan:Yeah. I'm keeping an eye out if, oh, is this like a big customer? Is this a regular customer? Is this ICP? And so on.
Jordan:So we're always commenting in there. And when it's a bad day, he and I are in are in there, like, you know, with, like, the John Travolta meme. Like, where's everybody?
Brian Casel:Right. What what's going on?
Jordan:What what happened here? Mhmm. So we're we're addicted to the day to day too.
Brian Casel:We've been talking about these, like, financial projections, financial goals. I, of course, have have my version of that, like I like I said. But for me, it's always also a balanced like, it's always a two sided goal for better or worse. And, like, I I know I I know of plenty of ways I can get to 1,000,000 in revenue a year, but a lot of them are things that, like, are nonstarters for me personally as a business owner and a creator and where I'm at now in my life and what my priorities are. Like, I could go I can go hard into services.
Brian Casel:I can go hard into, like, enterprise contracts. I can I can go hard into info products and and training? I could do coaching. These are all things I'm not interested in.
Justin:And
Brian Casel:and and there are like a big part of the the walks this week was diving deep into, what is the product mix have to look like, and then how does that translate into what I'm actually doing as my day to day work and what gives me the most energy, what's what's draining my energy, and where am I really happy with what I'm doing every day, and what am I not really loving? I I, you know, I hate the meme of, like, oh, just do what you love or follow your passion or whatever. Like, there's still a lot of strategic thinking behind all of this Yeah. From a business standpoint. But I I I do I do wanna get into at some point, like, the product learnings of of the past year, like courses versus software.
Justin:I I think
Jordan:this is great opportunity to kind of turn it from conceptual Mhmm. To to, alright. Well, summer's ending. Justin Can
Justin:I introduce one more conceptual thing before we move on?
Jordan:Sure. Sure.
Justin:Which is just this this idea of patient urgency. I think what another way of kind of shaping that up for me is this difference between, you know, here's all the things we could work on or that we are working on. And I've been looking at this a lot lately. You know, there's a whole bucket of things that teams and individual bootstrappers and everybody there's all sorts of things we work on or we could work on. And lately, I've just started to get obsessed about what actually matters in terms of outcomes.
Justin:What actually produces outcomes? And that could be what actually gets customers to sign up and stay. That's one. What actually sells? What features are have we built that have actually worked that have actually get mentioned actually get used actually generate sales?
Justin:And part of this idea for me of Patient Urgency is an impatience with this stuff, the stuff that we're working on that doesn't matter. And being able to identify what actually moves the needle and then having enough urgency to say, we are going to focus on this. And then being patient to understand that to do the things that move the needle, you do have to show up every day. And it's an accumulation of three hundred days and then six hundred days and then a thousand days that ends up producing the result. And for me, that's the whole tension with this is that, yeah, I want to be impatient with the stuff that's not working.
Justin:I want to be impatient with the stuff that's just actually wasted time if we're honest about it. And I want to be patient. Well, I want to identify the stuff that actually moves the needle that actually creates outcomes I want. And I want to be then patient about how we implement that. I know it's going to take time, But I would But the frustrating thing is to go, well, we've we've been working every single day for a thousand days on some things that actually didn't move the needle.
Brian Casel:To like, yes, and on that? Like, the what actually moves the needle, that that smaller box that you're showing on the screen. You know, you said something about like, what like, how can we optimize so that we just show up and do that thing consistently every day that we that we know or we believe drives the business forward and try to not emphasize the, you know, the other stuff. Yeah. I I think there's a thing there's an there's an additional element there, though, that, like, if if you're a solo like me or if you're a small team, I think you have to think about like, do we have the energy and the capability and the systems and the processes that will ensure that we are able to actually deliver that 20% every single day?
Brian Casel:Because if we don't have that, if if it's if it's a grind for us, if it if it for me personally, like like I've I've had things where I'm like, as long as I ship two YouTube videos every single week for fifty two weeks, this business is gonna grow. Yeah. But that is not realistic energy wise for me. You know? Yeah.
Brian Casel:And like and like or like whatever it might be. Or or it could be like, I made a decision six months ago that the business model is this, so we are gonna commit to that and ship this every single week, every month, and that's that's what we are committing to. But maybe maybe reality on the ground is not the same as it was six months ago, and we have to revisit what is the actual 20% in our business that that makes sense today, you know. Yeah. I think I think it's easy to to to tell ourselves some story of the future either like as long as I just grind and hustle and grind it out or tell us some story of the future like this works today, so it's gonna work for the next twenty four months.
Brian Casel:Let's just blindly follow this. You know?
Justin:Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what I'm talking about is having an awareness and being brutally honest. Like, okay, did that work? Is this working? Is this we're in motion this way, but and it might not be working if it's causing you too much pain.
Justin:It's just like, yeah, we can we did it, but it it it grinded us down to nothing. Right? It has to be it has to be achievable. The thing I see more often than not is people are they have blinders on. They're just like I'm they're just like, I'm gonna just show up on Twitter every day.
Justin:And because I like it. There's a little bit of, like, over thinking things or doing things that don't matter or focusing on the tooling or focusing on the there's a little bit of laziness or easiness to some of these things. And what I'm trying to do for myself is to push myself to say, what is the hard reality that is presenting itself in this moment? And to just tackle that. And to not to to wipe everything else away and just say, listen, like, got to be brutally honest about right this right now.
Justin:Now we might not have enough information yet, but I'm already watching this to go, is this it? And we've talked about trusting your gut more often. Once you are in the water, you're surfing every day, you know the waves, you know the water patterns, you know everything. You start to have some instincts that are like that wave there is trouble, but that wave there is achievable. That wave there is a waste of time.
Justin:And you just get brutally honest about it because it takes a lot of energy to paddle out and catch a wave.
Jordan:Yes. And you're foregoing the others. Yeah. I love the surfing reference. Absolutely.
Jordan:I have enormous sympathy for your situation, Brian, where that entire process around what to focus on, what to what to quit on, what to start new is entirely in your head. Because the reason I'm able to be successful with it, and I can actually say over the last like year, that we've actually been successful in launching experiments and then just killing them when they don't work. We just shut down our ambassador program this We were like, this is a good idea. We have 2,000 plus customers. Let's see who wants to enroll in an ambassador program.
Jordan:We found like 10 people that we were gonna pay and give an extra good affiliate deal. And what they would do is go out and post into their networks, into their Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups, and everything else. Great idea. Did not work, and we killed it.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:But the the reason it's, I think, much, much easier for me to make that decision is because I'm looking over at an employee and just saying, you're way outside that red affected box of things that move the needle. Mhmm. And I would like for you, otherwise known as I am telling you directly Mhmm. To get out of that area entirely and go find a happy home inside the box that actually moves the needle.
Brian Casel:You know, I'm I'm glad you brought that up. One of the one of the other big takeaways for me from this past week of thinking strategically, but also working, I I did some work on the downtime on overhauling my operations. And one of my biggest weak points historically, especially now, is like, growth experiments that are outside of me just showing up on YouTube or what or Twitter, whatever. And so, you know, I'm thinking about this company of one mentality. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:I'm thinking about going deep on this sounds silly to a lot of people I know, but like the idea of of growing my team with bots, with with AI agents. Right?
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:What I aim to do as as I build new products and and roll out my existing products is to build agent Growthbot agent experiment loops. So, yeah, I I have my building process pretty pretty solid at this point. I can I can spin up new products? I can, you know, maintain products. I can do content from from myself pretty well.
Brian Casel:The big gap in my operation has has been the growth side. And so and and, you know, also speaking to what Justin has been talking about here, the ideal, I think, is identifying that that small, that that 20%.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And having systems in place that will keep it going past the point where you personally stop having the energy to to hustle on
Justin:it. Mhmm. I'd like to hear more about that because I don't operate that way at all.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So like, like I because like everything I do, everything I do, whether it's a new product or a new marketing campaign or something, I'm, what I'm trying to do is spend like a month going hard myself. Mhmm. Like bootstrapping it, figuring it out, being creative, but standing up processes, putting either a team member in place or a bot in place. To keep it to keep it going for the next twelve months after I've moved on to the next thing, personally.
Brian Casel:So so my my thought, still experimental, is to to have us bench of growth bot, like, a growth bot on each of my products, and they are tasked with pitching growth experiment ideas. I approve or give input or give direction on those. Mhmm. They do all the things. They put up the landing pages.
Brian Casel:They create the content. They send the emails. They they run the ad campaigns. That whatever we're gonna be doing as the experiments, the bot is going to be doing those. And, yeah, I'm gonna put creative effort into putting the systems in place, enabling them to have that authority, putting the skills and the processes behind them, the training, the verification loops so that they can go through and look at a piece of content and does it does it meet my high standards of what I wanna publish under my name or or under this product brand or whatever it might be.
Brian Casel:They have loops that they follow to measure and report and decide like, okay, these things worked, these things didn't, here's what we've learned, here's the next round of experiments. And then they do it again. And so I wanna be spending my time working on the next product or shipping the next feature in one of my products and checking in on a weekly basis, getting these reports from my chief of staff bot and from my head of products and from my growth bots to say, here here are the experiments that we've run over there on FlyRight while I was working over here on Mimio, and these are the experiments. And and so, like, like, the hypothesis, again, like, growing a, what does it look like to grow a company of one with, know, that is heavily AI driven that that actually has growth systems behind the product line? That's what it looks like.
Brian Casel:Like, yes, I I can I can do the jump start thing where where I do a YouTube video about a thing or I tweet here and there to get to get the first 10 or 50 customers on a product? But, like, what are the systems that we can keep going automatically in the background? And so, like, that's what I'm trying to improve personally as, as like the business owner and the operators, how can I because I have these management skills? I've done that sort of thing with human teams in the
Justin:past. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Now in this era, I'm focused on doing this, like, really leaning into, like, like, a Grock bot or some system like that where I'm just interacting with these things and building systems to have have them run, you know.
Justin:I'm really curious to see if that works. It's been interesting to watch you, Brian, because your instincts are very different than mine. And I actually, in some ways, am allergic to too much process and too much like, when people people on teams I've worked on have said, oh, we really need to, like, think through this and develop a process. Often, I'm like, no. Let's let's go back to this quote I I brought up, which is from Hacker News, which is I should just read it.
Justin:This old 2020 Hacker News I don't
Jordan:know why it popped back up, but it became relevant again over the last few weeks and started getting yep.
Justin:The thread is talking about sales, but I think this just applies to so many things. Here's the quote. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible, or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost twenty years, and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
Justin:And I I think why this resonates with me is this is actually just my philosophy for life in general. It's like, well, let's figure out a perfect process and let's get their project management thing all ready to go, and let's make sure we can do it in an automated way. And no. Let's just go hit the ball and see what happens. And the truth might be that you just forever, for the rest of your life, somebody's got to walk up and hit that ball.
Justin:Like, there's no other way to do it. That's the way
Brian Casel:it But even that, even what you just described is the system. So Yes. It works it works for you because you have you or you have someone on your team who is it's their job to show up every day and hit the ball. Right? So if you don't have that person or if you don't personally have that type of energy or if you know that you can do that for a month, but then next month you're gonna get distracted and do something else, then that is an unreliable system.
Justin:Yes.
Brian Casel:You know, so so so then so that the way that I think about that is like, I'm operating under certain constraints. So if if these constraints are true, then what needs to change? What what do I need to design and optimize for given the constraints that I have?
Jordan:It's it's really it's really the keeping the constraints in mind pushes you much more toward automation and also your personality and your preferences. I I wanna I wanna put something in that sits right in between this conversation. The role of the human feels different but the same than it did a few years ago. So so right now, we are about to hire for the first time in two years. Right?
Jordan:We we were a bigger team. We trimmed down. We pivoted. We have not hired since. We let one person go.
Jordan:We went from six to five people and then we've just kind of hunkered down and stayed there. And my preference isn't really to hire much more. I I wanna be efficient and use these tools to give leverage. But we have a specific area in the business that will move the needle. Mhmm.
Jordan:And that is a customer success function. I'm not I'm not even gonna say a person or hire just yet. It's a customer success function. We have we have a good top of funnel and we have a good mechanism for getting sign ups. The product is rolling, the engineering's rolling, the features are in good shape, the road map, all that stuff.
Jordan:But it's this it's the in between parts of the funnel where our churn is higher than I want it to be. Mhmm. Our activation is good, but I know it can be better. Mhmm. We see a lot of people who are perfect customers sign up for a trial and then not convert.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:And so when I look at that, I can't help but think pure automation is not gonna do
Brian Casel:it. Mhmm.
Jordan:Yeah. And we've and we we've also tried to run experiments before hiring to understand a little bit. Like what you're saying, like like bootstrap the first month to just, like, get a clue for the process. Yeah. So so when we look at this now, if you look at that function, you're like, you need to reach out to people.
Jordan:You need to build relationships with people. But that doesn't mean you have to do it without AI and automation and leverage.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:So it something about, like, hesitating right before posting this job, I almost wanted to, like, understand where does the human stop and the AI start? Mhmm. And vice versa. What is this role? I want an energetic young person to come in there and be ready to talk to 20 people a day.
Jordan:Mhmm. But also, not just gonna be like, well, here's a phone and don't use any tools and no automation just whenever someone signs up, call them. Like, that that's not quite right either.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, it's it's definitely a human role and and people person type of type of role for sure. But I I guess in your case, like, they they need to feel very comfortable and at home with
Jordan:Comfortable. Right. We can They help people
Brian Casel:don't have to do everything. They don't have to build stuff, but they need to be able to, like, operate a Slack and and, like, and be able to talk to a product team and understand things that they can relay to customers and stuff
Jordan:like that. You know? Yes. It's like the expectations have changed. Brian, you're almost, like like, demanding of that role to be almost entirely automated with you checking in as necessary.
Brian Casel:Well, it's just a completely different type of business and target customer too. It's like Mhmm. Of co like, what you just described, of course, it makes sense for your customers. Like, I'm
Jordan:not selling that signs up.
Brian Casel:I'm not selling to landscapers. So Right.
Justin:Although I have said with Brian, I think if he was gonna hire a human person, it would be community manager who would do some of that stuff. So somebody lands in Discord, and it's like, there is some person there welcoming them, figuring out who they are, what they're there for, all that stuff.
Brian Casel:It's I I'm interested in that too. I agree. Like, if if I were to bring someone on, that would probably be the area where a human makes the most sense in my team. However, I will say that, like, I've enjoyed the community side a lot more than I expected I would a year ago. And I'm actually pretty excited about leaning more into that.
Brian Casel:And I do these, like, monthly ish live calls with members, and I'm actually really enjoying that. And I wanna double down on that. But the one of the big other learnings sort of related to all this is courses versus software products and tools. Mhmm. And I think in my year as I head into year two of this business, a big learning for me is I think I'm done creating courses, at least for a while.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. And I can I wanna speak to this because, like, I won't really abandon my role as a teacher? I just think that I'll I'll still be teaching and communicating more on like my free channels, YouTube, X, newsletter. I I spend a lot of I I created these two big flagship courses inside of Builder Methods Pro, and I sort of centered a a big part of the value prop of becoming a member as you get access to all these courses. 100 plus video lessons across the two of them.
Brian Casel:It's just in this space, in AI land, the shelf life of these courses is so short. Yeah.
Jordan:I mean, like courses is such a great business model.
Brian Casel:It used to be. It used to be. At least and and in this particular space of AI adoption education, man, I mean, I just launched a course last week. Two months. Called Become AI Native.
Brian Casel:And in that very week, Grockbot launches and and and cloud agents are becoming a a big thing. And those are a little bit more cutting edge, I I realize. And and the everything I'm teaching in in Become AI Native is still relevant, but it's not gonna have the same stuff or it's not gonna have the most relevant, cutting edge workflows and techniques that keep coming out every month. And Yeah. And it's like
Justin:Can can I give you an example, Brian, of something like I would love from Builder Methods that you give a bit of this, but from there's a lot of products I pay for where all of the they have a dashboard and an app that you can log into and all that stuff. The only thing I pay attention to is the emails. So SEO testing is this one product that I have, and I've set up a few tests in there. The reason I keep paying is he keeps sending me, here are your top keywords that people use to search for you this month. And here's the clicks on your different landing pages if they're up or down.
Justin:I keep paying I rarely log
Brian Casel:in to like that. Like, don't have to log in to get the value.
Justin:Yeah. So the one thing I want in I want is this is a perfect example right now. Right now, I know from being in Slack and on Reddit and on social media, there's chatter that people are not happy with Opus five. Like, here's why they don't like it. Here's Here's what people are doing instead.
Justin:I want that email. I want this this week's sentiment analysis. This week's sentiment, Opus five down. What are people using instead? They're using Fable until they run out.
Justin:And then they're using Soul code. They're using codex for these kinds of things. I need, like, a weekly reminder. I can't keep up with this. I'm just Yeah.
Justin:Using Opus five like a doofus.
Brian Casel:So so, you know, a lot those exact conversations are happening inside the Builder Methods Pro community. So with the courses, what what I learned is like, okay, it it takes a a ton of energy as a big grind for me to create these things and get them out. And and I don't love that energy drain on on my side personally. Plus, you have the shelf life, which is terrible. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And I'm not just reality, I'm not gonna go back into these courses every month and and update them with fresh content, fresh lessons. Just that doesn't happen. Yeah. But what you're describing there, Justin, like, don't I also don't think I'm gonna be a newswire for AI. And that is exhausting.
Brian Casel:I've tried to do that with my YouTube channel. And it's just you're you're on a never ending treadmill. And and I don't you know, yeah, I agree with you. There's value there. And there are some really great newsletters out there that do that sort of thing, and channels that do that.
Brian Casel:But I don't think that's what I'm what I'm going for. Mhmm. Although although those chats do happen in the in the community, and maybe we can do a better newsletter that surfaces stuff from from our community. We can do that. But the I compared the experience of building and selling and framing the value around my courses to the experience of releasing software tools like Flyrite, Mimio, and my open source frameworks.
Brian Casel:And and when I say software, it doesn't necessarily have to be apps. Like, it could just be systems and operating frameworks. It could be conventions. It could be whatever. Like, these are things that scratch my own itch.
Brian Casel:I use them every day. I use Flyrite every day. I use Mimio every day. Mhmm. So I am constantly shipping improvements.
Brian Casel:If you are one of the Flyrite customers, you're seeing every single day, I'm pushing out updates. You can look at the change log. These are just little improvements, new features that I want, or the customers are emailing in and saying like, would really love if Flyrite could do this. And I'm like, hell yeah, that's a great idea. I want that too.
Brian Casel:Let me ship that. And so the difference between those products is like, you're constantly getting my latest current up to date taste pushed right into the product every single day. Whereas the course is something that sits on the shelf and it and it, and it's like a snapshot in time from a few months ago. That's where my head is leaning as I think about what is the product mix going forward, I think I'm really gonna be leaning much harder back into software products. I don't know how many, it might be one or two that, that get traction and I start to focus all the energy there.
Brian Casel:It might grow to a larger portfolio. I don't know. But that is where I think I need to be pushing my energy going forward. And the and the Builder Methods Pro membership starts to shift. Like the courses are there.
Brian Casel:You can go, you can go through them. Some people get a lot of value out of them today still, but the, the value would shift more toward, like you're saying, like the community aspect, that benefit and like access to to tools, whether it's like some tools are just included or you just get, you know, discounts as a member. Like the the tools themselves will be standalone businesses like Flyrite has its own site, Mimio has its own. And and I'm gonna have growth, you know, have these, like, growth channel, growth bots running on on all these at all times, but also running, like, builder methods, the membership. You know, you like, there's a few companies that sort of operate on this model.
Brian Casel:If you look at, every
Jordan:Yeah. Do something similar
Brian Casel:to this.
Justin:Although I have to I have to keep reminding people that every is not a very good business in terms of they've been around a long time. Their revenues hasn't been great. I don't know what it is lately, but
Brian Casel:couple million in a year. I mean,
Justin:I can't remember when they started, but yeah.
Brian Casel:And they have a big consulting side too. They do that too, you know?
Justin:Yeah. I my sense my sense is it's not a very good business, but I I could be wrong.
Jordan:Yeah. They they do good work. I'll give them that. I don't know how their business is. Hopefully, it's been great over the last year since they've kind of made a name for themselves.
Jordan:So let's hold that thought, Brian, on the I I wanna ask a lot of questions about the type of software product. Generally speaking, I think it is an unbelievably good time to start a bootstrap software company. Mhmm. I think it is fantastic. Yep.
Jordan:We've we've talked a little bit about over my, you know, my interest over the summer about acquiring software companies. And for a while, I thought like distressed VC backed was interesting. I actually think bootstrapped is where there's a ton a ton of of value to build. So a little bit of a separate conversation. Justin, what are you gonna do?
Jordan:September comes around
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:To get your team working
Justin:on the things that matter. I think we've already started that process in that we can see now the way I framed video is like, wanted to do it for a long time. And we kind of kept pushing it off. And then finally, it was just like John and I got together. It's like, John, we've done all these secondary things.
Justin:But the learning is in business, if you're always like saying, oh, well, here's the first, the top priority, the thing that is burning in your gut saying this is what we should build is like, we're not going to do that. It's like, okay, well, I guess we'll go to second or third order things. Second or third order things, just like being on the second or third page of Google, you might as well not have done them. It's just a second or third order thing. Does not move the needle.
Justin:And so once we said, I said, listen, I I just feel strongly that this is the move. This is the thing that's going move the needle. Well, we had evidence of all the other things we've done. Nothing has increased expansion revenue. Nothing has increased upgrades.
Justin:Nothing has increased sign ups, really. That that we were still riding on the initial insight I had when John and I started. We're still running on the initial insight John and I had at the beginning, which is something came from my own podcasting career, which was like, I don't wanna pay for every show I start. I wanna do unlimited podcasts for one price. And that just made us all of our money forever.
Jordan:It's a great idea.
Justin:Hell yeah. And every and everything else we've tried didn't move the needle. And I said, well, let's do the hard thing. You know, Jesse Hanley, do the hardest thing. Let's just do the hardest thing.
Justin:And we we've started doing the hardest thing. And so far, everything's up. Expansion revenue is up. People signing up on the higher plans is up. It's all up.
Justin:So now we have some evidence.
Brian Casel:Do you mean by the hard thing? Like, video launch? Or
Justin:Yeah. The hard thing in this case would be hardest thing the way I understand it from Jesse is, like, don't focus on these, like, easy, low hanging fruit. Don't build especially these days, don't build a MicroSaaS. Don't build another AI transcription feature. Don't build these are all low hanging fruit.
Justin:What's the what's the thing that the highest value thing we could build? It's probably also a harder lift than anything else we would do. It's probably the thing we've been avoiding because it's just like, oh, that's that's tricky. You know?
Jordan:It's a big project. So if we start that, we won't get to these other things. So let's just knock these other things out. We'll get to that.
Justin:That's right. And this feels like
Jordan:a normal boulders, rock, and pebble Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. It's It's nice to ship a feature every month. Like, that's a nice cadence. But if what you're shipping every month doesn't matter, then what what are you doing? So now we have some evidence, and we'll see if it pans out.
Justin:So far, it's panned out that the team's
Jordan:got the feedback?
Justin:You can see the re we said I said, here's my theory. My theory is that it's going to increase expansion revenue. We're gonna have more upgrades than we ever had before, and we're gonna have more people signing up on the higher plans. And so far, that's come true.
Brian Casel:Also, like, whether this works or not, it looks like it's working. But regardless, it's also a piece of evidence to your team. It's like, look how much more ambitious we can be. Look look at how we can reframe what we see as too big of a boulder. Let's push it off.
Brian Casel:Because that that was the reality years ago. But now we can look at a big feature. Let's build a video podcasting platform And and it it's so much easier to say yes than than to say, like, no, maybe later. Too complicated now.
Jordan:Yeah. It builds your political capital as a leader
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:Because it gives people the confidence to trust when you're leading them somewhere that feels dangerous or challenging. Yeah. You you get it right once, you you get more room to make mistakes, and the next ambitious thing to ask of them
Justin:Yeah. It it also ignites for this isn't not everybody will respond this way, but I think the right people by the way, a lot of people on my team don't love video. Like, a lot of them are they love old audio podcasts. That's why they got into it. RSS is way simpler.
Justin:It's way more pure. It identifies more with the open source community. These are all things I share too.
Jordan:Yeah. Also wrong.
Justin:But also wrong in the fact in the sense that listen. If we're gonna keep being a company, if we're gonna keep being able to pay ourselves, if we're gonna keep being able to have growing revenue, we have to go where the market's going. And the right people, I think, will respond to that and go, okay. Even if I'm not completely my personal feelings might be different, but I'm going to respond to the moment. And here's an example of that.
Justin:So like I said, Michael is on customer success. He says, can I do a Zoom call with everybody that signs up? Well, now Michael's noticing when he does these I see him in chat. He'll just say he'll be chatting with somebody. He'll just say, well, do you wanna just jump on a Zoom call right now?
Justin:Perfect moment to do it. People jump on the Zoom call. And now he's like in those calls, he's noticing, oh, I have the opportunity to say, well, we have video now. I don't know if you knew that. You can upgrade your plan right now from 19 to '49 or '19 to '99 or whatever.
Justin:And he's finding basically nine times out of 10, he gets somewhere on the call. They upgrade. The and again, Michael doesn't love video podcast. It's not like he's it's the the thing that does
Brian Casel:fire him talking to people. He loves talking about the product. Like, that's
Justin:And the it's super fun. He's messaging me in chat. He's like, it's super fun to talk to somebody on a chat and then go, holy crap, Justin. Like, this person upgraded on the call. I'm like, hell yeah.
Justin:And then I said, imagine, Michael. Imagine if we did this. Imagine if we filtered all of our customers, took out all the Gmail addresses or whatever, and then we just give you a thing that says, this person's been a customer for six months. Call them. And so Michael just goes on live chat.
Justin:Hey, can I show you what's new in Transistor? A personal demo right now. Sure. We'll see if you can start getting people in and he'll just show them around and say, hey, don't know if you knew this, but we have video. And my guess is the answer is gonna be someone's been podcasting for six months and they'll get, oh, I didn't know you had video.
Justin:Well, yeah. Let me show you to you. Oh, how do I get on that? Well, you have to upgrade your account.
Jordan:Funny how, like, to get you started for the first few months at a better price. And then Yes. It's like that is literally all of that work. The research, automating it, the messaging, the call, the upgrade, that entire thing just lives inside that red box. And it just does nothing nothing but move the needle.
Jordan:Nothing extraneous. Nothing extraneous. You're reaching out to people and saying, we have more stuff to sell you that you will want. It'll be good for you and it'll be good for us.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. And it's in in a in a weird way, it's like your existing customers can sometimes be the most tuned out to what to the to the big new stuff. Because they're just they're just happy and quiet, and especially if it's the type of service like Transistor, which sort of you get the value of it with it running in the background. Like, I don't have to log in every day. I don't even have to really pay attention to your automated newsletter stuff every day.
Brian Casel:Right? Like, because I'm just a happy paying customer. But Yep. You know, those are the people who are most likely to be fans of the newest, biggest stuff. How do we make them aware?
Brian Casel:By the
Justin:way, this is another reason you do just have to go and hit the ball. Because you don't know shit before you've hit the ball. Like, you're saying, oh, maybe I gotta I I saw on on Instagram that you gotta, like, do this. And it's like, just go hit the ball fucking once. And then you learn so much.
Justin:Once you've hit the ball once, then you learn. So one thing we learn from these calls this idea is so crazy. Everybody says do not do personal calls for a $19 a month product. This is what everybody says at the it's like, don't do that. You can't scale it.
Brian Casel:Yes.
Justin:We said we're gonna do it. What we learned is that we often get customers on that have been customers for a while, and they go, oh, I didn't realize you had this feature. I'm like, goddamn it. We've mentioned that feature a 100 times.
Jordan:Doesn't matter.
Justin:They have no idea. We need another channel to get it to get in touch with those people. And now we found one. And the other reason I like it is nobody else is gonna do it. Because it's too hard.
Justin:It's it's people are lazy. It's like, this is what fires me up. And when you have it fires me up even more when you have a team member that's coming to you and saying, hey, can I do this? It's like, yes. Can we find 10 more of you?
Justin:Yeah. Like How
Jordan:how are you outreaching? I'm I'm curious because we're we're dealing with this right now. And we started texting people, started calling people, then you realize, like, we're gonna get sued if we keep texting everyone. We need to opt in. It's it's kind of annoying, but but email is email is not
Justin:email is
Jordan:not very
Justin:effective. We're finding two things. I send about, let's say, twenty, twenty five welcome emails a day. That's how many sign ups we typically have. What all do you send?
Justin:Well, automatic. That's a process. Okay. Automatic process. Welcome emails go up.
Justin:Systems guy. Of those twenty twenty five I send out, I will get five to 10 responses from those. And of the five to 10 that respond, I would say it's it's 80% of them end up booking a call with Michael. That's pretty high if they respond. But the other thing we're finding that works with existing customers is a customer will ask will will text in and sorry, live chat, and they'll say, hey.
Justin:I've got this issue or whatever. Increasingly, Michael is just saying, oh, can I just jump on a Zoom call with you? Now people love this. People love this. And while he's on the Zoom call, he'll fix it around, and he'll say, oh, by the way, while I'm here, you wanna see a few new things that we've released with Transistor?
Justin:And most of the time, people say, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Show me.
Justin:And then he'll show them, and then we're off to the races. It also works with onboarding customers. Right? This is why customer success to me is such an important role. I don't think I will ever automate it with bots.
Justin:Because to have somebody come to you and say, hey, I'm brand new. I'm just trying to get this set up. And then you're super helpful. Then you say, oh, you know what? It'd be easier if I just show you.
Justin:Let's just jump on a Zoom call. And then while you're on the Zoom call, just say, oh, by the way, we got this. Oh, I didn't know you had that. Yeah. Do you wanna upgrade?
Justin:Yeah. I'll upgrade.
Jordan:So And so that's kind of been my obsession. Because every single day when I look at the support channel, I see, can someone just call me?
Justin:Mhmm. Can I talk
Jordan:to a real person? Like like, these are not technical people and they're like, I'm
Brian Casel:trying to
Jordan:set up an AI agent. It would be great if you could help me. Yep. And I'm like, okay. That's actually a role.
Jordan:That's actually someone who should just do that all the time instead of Yeah. Just waiting for the person to say, will someone call me? Yep. They should just be asked there and be like, hi. I'm Brenda and I'm available to help you.
Jordan:Yep.
Justin:The the other thing you have because I signed up for your product. Tried it out. Rosie's great, by the way. Rosie's awesome. Love love trying it out.
Justin:But now I'm getting all your onboarding emails, and you send quite a few. That's surface area for just all the time in the PS and the postscript. You just say, by the way, Brenda's available for Zoom calls. And then we just link to a SavvyCal link, which is then their availability, and then they book the counter. Oh, that's another process, Brian.
Justin:And the
Brian Casel:Like, Brendan is So
Justin:what I found, Jordan, is that the first email, people go, oh, yeah. Whatever. Welcome email. And then the second I know what
Jordan:that is.
Justin:And then the fourth, they're like, oh, wait. I gotta check this out. And then as as they're looking at it, they're like, oh, fuck. Like, I this is too much for me. I'm overwhelmed.
Justin:And then they see, oh, I can jump on a Zoom call. Sure. Mhmm. Click it. Book it.
Justin:It happens. I highly recommend it. But don't hire Michael. He's mine. Yeah.
Justin:I I haven't
Jordan:hired him long enough where I don't remember what to do or where to go or what the process looks like. Yep.
Justin:I you know, I've hired a lot of people for meetups. I like meetups. I go to local meetups. I organize local meetups. You learn pretty quick.
Justin:Just I mean, I get a sense for people. I haven't always been right, but my hit rate on hiring people that I've met in real life is way higher than what I've just opening it up.
Jordan:The interview process is a really tough environment to get a read and a vibe on someone.
Brian Casel:Especially for that type of role, like a customer success role. Like, there it's a completely different hiring process for, like, a developer or something like that or a designer.
Jordan:Right. It's more quantitative. We've always done
Justin:a three month pilot for us.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You gotta do something like that.
Justin:Like, three months like, on contract. So it's an extension of the 37 signals idea. It's not always possible, but
Brian Casel:Sorry. Like like, that type of role is, like, so easy to get the the misread from a really good interviewer. Somebody who's just they're they're it's gonna attract people people person people. Right? Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And those those people are gonna be great at interviewing. Yeah. Are they gonna be great as a team member?
Justin:You know? That's a Yeah. Yeah. It's true. I I yeah.
Justin:I mean, the other thing I I've like I said, I've had a great experience now hiring a summer intern. I think identifying young talent right now is people are hungry. The young people are hungry. Not all of them. Some a lot of them are maybe lazy or misguided or whatever or depressed.
Justin:But there's some people that are just go getters. And the the bar is actually not that high. To me, it seems incredibly low. But yeah. Well, Ian came to every single meetup, always talked, always it was very clear.
Justin:I'm here because I'm looking for a summer internship. And then he started sharing stuff. We have a a Slack for the meetup group. He's like, hey, I just finished my previous internship. Here's a video of all the lessons I learned.
Justin:And that was the trigger for me to be like, okay, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna try to hire this guy. So I I wanna see to me, it's like the good folks reveal themselves. You can see Michael, I hired when I was going on I I was just burnt out from answering support tickets all the time. I was like, I need a summer off.
Justin:I said he was, like, transitioning out of management at a grocery store company, and he was, like, looking for something else. I said, can I hire you for a summer? It might not be long distant long term, but let's do a summer. And he did it, and he he's been there ever since.
Brian Casel:You know, I realize I'm very different from both of you guys when it comes to how I go about high like, I've had teams of 25 and and my management style there. And now, how I'm thinking more about, like, systems and processes with, like, you know, AI driven team members. But I wanted to call out I'm gonna post this in the chat. Ryan Carson, you know, industry veteran. He's been making the rounds lately on a couple different podcasts.
Brian Casel:A really good one I just posted, we can link it up for the show notes is, him and Claire Vaux on her, How I AI podcast and YouTube channel. Really, really, like this is one of my favorite listens while I was on vacation this week. It's it's just came out a few days ago. And like what Ryan has been doing with his business, I mean, I've been following him for decades, like really great builder in general, but
Justin:Future of web apps, Tree Treehouse was
Brian Casel:his Treehouse. Now he's doing like a SaaS for like AI divorce lawyers.
Jordan:Yes. Apparently.
Brian Casel:Very interesting. So so he he's been big on obviously, like cutting edge on on using AI and everything. Lately, he's been very big on on managing teams of agents. Like but, like, so far, he's he's always a bunch of steps ahead in terms of, like, workflow and tooling, but he made a really great point on on, especially on that podcast with with Claire Vaux because both of them are like probably around our age or, like like, industry veterans been around, have hired hundreds of people, have managed hundreds of people in different companies. And they were talking about like taking that management experience, that people, that that hiring experience into the AI realm and and have and and using that as your leverage point for building processes for AI teams.
Brian Casel:Right? Mhmm. And that and and I think on this podcast, he was talking more about, like, the product cycle, but I've heard him, like, with Andrew Warner talking talking about, like, like, marketing and growth too. Like that those can be AI driven employees that are running on loops. And if you have this experience of of building systems and processes that people plug into and you you can still have room for human input and creativity and strategy, but being able to design, like, not only processes, but like how to think and how to how to make decisions, how how to how to grade and critique the quality of this thing or the or the outcome of this thing, and then have that spin up into the next thing, and and, like, that's how you go from I I think most of our industry right now are using AI, like, one one to one.
Brian Casel:I'm just gonna open up one Claude session and work on this thing with Claude
Justin:still using it. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So most of us are still doing it. But, like, there are people now who are running 50 agents at a time, like, 40 p r's a day. And, like, how is that actually possible? Systems.
Brian Casel:Like, it's not, you don't have to personally be overseeing every single PR. You just have to be able to design systems and training and processes and verification loops that these things can actually run.
Justin:Mhmm. By the way, Brad, one thing Jordan and I have said over and over again is like, we would both hire that person to just somebody to just come and implement that for us.
Jordan:Yeah. Well, I I think what Justin's saying is the same thing that's going on in my head, which is if you show me any proof at all of it being effective, I will just hand you my money. Mhmm. And and not for for for multiple reasons, But when I think about hiring someone for customer success, it is not a small thing to ask someone to join your company, stop what they're doing, maybe leave a previous job. And I like to talk tough.
Jordan:If it does work out, just fire them. But I don't wanna do that. You know? Even with a consultant, it's it's a big deal because Yeah. You know, been working with them for a year and you're like, look, I still do it when it is called for, but it is.
Jordan:There's a lot of friction there. If I think about an agent that does a job, I'll give you an example. I want an agent to automatically go through Google Business Profiles in a specific location and run through whether or not each individual listing is a good customer fit for us. And if so, spin up a landing page. I don't even know if you need to spin up a landing page.
Jordan:Just create a QR code, send off copy or whatever data you need into a direct mail API. So that they can print up a letter and then send it off to that business owner with a QR code that leads to their Rosie agent.
Brian Casel:I
Jordan:just I just want that to happen every day, all day, nonstop without me thinking about it.
Brian Casel:But it's one
Jordan:of these things, like, a person's not gonna do it. Hold on. I I wanna transition to, like, asking you about it. Don't teach me how to do that. Yeah.
Jordan:Just just do that for me. Right. Do that for me and I will just pay you a thousand bucks a month and be, like, the best employee leverage for the money I've ever come across in ever. Just take my take my goddamn money.
Brian Casel:I'm just never gonna be the person who's gonna try to convince either of you or anyone else that, like, this is the right way and there's a wrong way and a right way to run your business because there's not. There's there's there's the Jordan Gal way. There's the Justin Jackson way. And Sure. You know, like and and you should do it the Jordan Gal way, frankly.
Brian Casel:Like, because that's obviously what works. Like, you know, like, so, like, I'm
Justin:I'm But we would hire somebody like you to do to come and help us figure that out.
Brian Casel:That's the Yeah. I personally believe that more businesses are gonna be hiring that AI systems engineer type person. And I also believe, and I see this, that another point Ryan Carson made, but I'm gonna make it as well, is that there's a there's a miss understanding that like AI is removing the technical knowledge required to build apps. Instead, it's the opposite. I think the more people and operators builders lean into AI, the more technical they actually become.
Brian Casel:You're actually becoming more technical by adopting AI, not less technical. Yeah. Because the more because like non technical business owners or domain experts or operators in some industry who are now stepping into the tech world because AI is the gateway into this world that was inaccessible to them before. Yes, they are more capable, but they are also learning so much about tech, about how software and and engineering systems work now. Like, people are learning what GitHub is for the very first time.
Brian Casel:Like, that that is miles ahead of of what where what most of the world was was doing before. So, like, there is this shift of of people becoming more technical. And I also do believe that for, of course, plenty of businesses are and and founders and owner operators are not gonna have that, like, that interest or lean toward wanting to get into the into the weeds with your hands dirty. Right. Or just wanna hire.
Brian Casel:So there is gonna be a larger market, a growing market of AI systems engineers for hire. Like, that's already happening, you know? Yeah.
Justin:Want to
Jordan:go to a marketplace and I want to buy an employee. I want to buy an employee agent.
Brian Casel:And also just like what you described, that whole process of like an agent who goes through directories and identifies quality leads and, and, you know, scores them and sets up the QR code. All of those are mechanics that are absolutely can be Yeah. Automated. Can't it can't be done in one day. It probably takes a week of hacking on it.
Brian Casel:You know, somebody just, like, going step by step and Yep. And putting the glue together. But, like, totally possible.
Jordan:I like what you're it reminds me of when we got started in AI voice, and a big attraction for me is was that it wasn't very good, but I knew it was gonna be good. So it was the right time to get started on it. Before, it was obvious. Oh my god. This thing can answer the phone for businesses.
Jordan:Let's all build them Right. Which is what's happening now. Mhmm. So right now, it feels like an army of agents working you you the ability to manage multiple agents operating at all times on your behalf and then still having a proper orchestration layer and a verification layer and reviews, it feels very conceptual right now because Mhmm. Because I know there are people running 40 agents.
Jordan:I don't know of any people running 40 agents who are making $5,000,000 a month being like, look at how effective it it is. As opposed to look at how much I'm shipping or or something else. But if it crosses over and you're in that spot as an expert and with something to offer and sell, when it crosses over, there will be a whole bunch of money coming in that direction the same way as as AI voice.
Brian Casel:Even the stuff that Brian Casel has been sharing about his own business, like, he has had these, like, growth loops and he is a he is a company of one. Like like, mark marketing loops, not just product loops.
Jordan:His divorced product is just him?
Brian Casel:Yes. Right now, he he said he's hiring his first employee. Like, that's his thing.
Jordan:You know? Well, Justin, let's let's take it over
Brian Casel:to you. I I guess we
Jordan:we should finish up soon unless we wanna
Justin:start Why why don't we address Pascal's stuff? Extremely exciting. What was Pascal? We got Jason Cohen saying, Most marketing tactics no longer work, but personal connections do. And then it looks like Oh, Ryan was from Noah Toa, was saying his top to do list this week is how many one on ones can I have this week?
Justin:How many one to five or one to 10 interactions can I have this week? I think we've kinda touched on this. I don't know if that paraphrase of Jason Cohen is entirely correct. I think marketing has certainly gotten more challenging. There's there's we've talked about this.
Justin:There's so much more noise. I wanna just go back to I think too many founders are fiddling around when they should just go hit the ball. I I have a a blog post on my site that just says, email a 100 people before you've done anything else. It's a perfect example of this. Like, if you're just starting out, the the highest leverage thing you can do is email a 100 people.
Justin:And then people say, well, I don't even know one person in my target market. This is the wrong category for you. If you can't think of one person, go email a 100 people. And then you're gonna feel all of the stuff. Right?
Justin:You go email a 100 people about something, they you have even 10 reply. And you say, hey, can you tell me how did you buy the product you're using right now? When was that? What was going on in your life? What convinced you, etcetera?
Justin:What would it take you to switch? I have customers with Transistor. I just hung out with one on Vancouver Island, Mike Vardy. That I had that exact I when we started Transistor, I emailed a 100 people. He was one of the people that replied.
Justin:He's like I was like, listen, the product sucks right now. There's nothing there. And he's like, okay. And I'm like, I want you to sign up. I'll give you a deal.
Justin:Sign up for $10 a month. And he's like, okay. That that's your first step. So I think yeah. I think the the the marketing tactics, there's still stuff to do there.
Brian Casel:I tend to think I I basically agree with you, but I also think, at least from in my experience, like the big motivating factor for going and talking to customers is recognizing signal. Like customers are hungry for this. And that's just what makes it easier not only to reach them, but like motivates me. As soon as somebody sends me an email like, hey, when are you opening up that Mimio product? Because I've I got a couple of those this week.
Brian Casel:Like that fires me up to like, go sell that product and go talk to and learn every single thing I could possibly learn about that person and their
Justin:I'm having a hard time keeping track of all the products. I I'm still I still go Brian equals Builder Methods and FilterHawk. That's the that's what's thrown by FlyRight. Oh, yeah. FlyRight's in there too.
Jordan:Can I actually use this as a transition to talk about product decisions and, like, what what to sell? Alright. I'm hosting today and I get to tell a story.
Brian Casel:Okay? Yes.
Jordan:Do it. Here's my story. I don't wanna mention the name of the company.
Justin:Do
Jordan:it. But no. No. No. No.
Jordan:It's because I I I got to know the the founder over a call and
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:That feels rude. So we had a competitor that we lost some customers to. And that always always painful. It's inevitable. But it obviously makes you aware of them in that way.
Jordan:Mhmm. So we we had customers leaving or or testing us out. So clearly, it was, like, in the same space. And a few maybe a month ago, we got wind of the fact that they were going out of business. And we were very confused because the people that left are the the reason we found out they were going out of business is because a few of the customers that left us for them came back.
Jordan:And we were like, well, what happened? Clearly, their product was terrible and ours is so much better. Right? And Yeah. Their response was actually their product was great.
Jordan:Oh. Which is confusing. And was like, well, let me understand what what's going on here.
Brian Casel:You're saying it's they're they're another AI voice product?
Jordan:It was an AI voice product. And we we had customers leave and then come back and and the feedback they gave us was that their product was was good. And that's confusing. Like, okay. Well, why are they going out of business?
Jordan:What's going on?
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:So I looked at the situation. I said, you know what makes sense? Let me reach out to this founder because I don't know how many customers they actually have but it's a pretty big number on their website. Maybe I could, like, buy this customer list, transition, you know, use that as an opportunity to basically absorb their customers that need a new home.
Justin:Yeah. You gotta
Jordan:do it. Yeah. So I look at their company. Turns out they raise money. So I start going through the VC list.
Jordan:Turns out I pitched a few of those VCs. So I email them and I say, hey, I'm trying to get in touch with the founder of this company. I know they're shutting down. Can you get me in touch? That got me in touch with the founder.
Jordan:I had to call them. Very, very candid, open conversation. I was very grateful. Here's what happened. They had a good thing with the AI voice product.
Jordan:They got traction. They grew revenue. They used that traction to go raise money. Soon as they raised money, their ambitions grew, and they tried to take over the website, and the CRM, and the email, and the outbound, and it all collapsed. Mhmm.
Jordan:Because the product became too complicated for self serve. Yeah. So they shut down self serve and moved toward like an enterprise y mid market thing. And when that didn't work, they were like, we can't even imagine going back to self serve. So we're just we're just done.
Justin:Wow.
Jordan:And and then this week, we got a notification that a different competitor raised money. And we go to their website, and it's like coming soon. The CRM and the website and the outbound and the email, and I'm just looking at it like, okay. There is so much danger in over complicating the product right now.
Brian Casel:You had me at AI Voice. I don't need it
Justin:all. Right.
Jordan:Right. And the look. If you look at our product, we have a website chat now. That I look at as like a it that's a it's a selling bullet point. Mhmm.
Jordan:When you use Rosie for your AI voice, you get a free web chat. So if you're paying for a web chat right now, don't. Or if you're looking at another competitor that doesn't have that bullet point, we have that bullet point.
Brian Casel:I still like that as a as a an adjacent thing because it's still solving the same problem. It's like inbound leads.
Jordan:Right. Right. But we and we just integrated with with CRMs. Great. That doesn't really expand the product.
Jordan:It like pushes data from the phone conversations into the CRM. And we just we haven't launched yet, but we finished. It's in production integration with Facebook and Instagram DMs, which is very important especially for the Shopify segment segment that we wanna go at. Mhmm. So I am trying not to overcomplicate.
Jordan:I am looking at, like, the carcass of a great competitor with a good product. I'm looking at others raise money. Owner.com, which is like restaurant websites and AI voice, just raised 230,000,000. 240,000,000 at a $2,300,000,000 valuation announced today. And and what is their video talk about?
Jordan:We are for all small businesses, not just for restaurants. I'm like, okay. Okay. Okay. So, like, this natural pull these days between raising money and the expectations there and the AI tools being obviously these facilitators of of features coming out much faster.
Jordan:When I look at that, I just I just look over to like the friendly angel on my shoulder in the form of Jason Fried being like, we're just doing the same thing that we've done for twenty years and people are happy about it. And that's what we're gonna do. So Mhmm. Brian, walking into this market with like a new software idea, how do you think about like, alright, where's my lane? What's what's, you know, am I gonna sell to
Brian Casel:You're talking about mine or yours?
Jordan:No. Yours. Yours. Like, are you gonna sell to to to AI people that kind of want all this new stuff? Like, where do you go with that?
Brian Casel:High level, you gotta, you know, understand that I'm coming from a very, very different place than you guys. Than than, especially you, Jordan, because like, I'm completely bootstrapped and I'm like sort of free to explore. Like, and like, I have like, optionality. Like, that is my thing that I tend to optimize for, at least right now in this phase. Because, you know, I have builder methods and that and I'm not and I'm I'm still building builder methods, like, as the umbrella brand or or at least, the community side of what I'm doing, but I'm but I am gonna be shifting more towards like more tools, less courses.
Brian Casel:I've I've already sort of decided that. Beyond that, it might be multiple more tools. It might be just one or two more. It depends on which ones gain gain traction and and and get the heat. Right?
Brian Casel:But high level, like, mission wise, it hasn't really changed. Like, I'm still here to help people adopt AI, And I do that through teaching business systems and delivering business systems and delivering tools that help you use and adopt and change the way that you work to become more AI native. And and now and my my ethos going into year two now is like, I think the way to do that is less about training courses that have a short shelf life and more about giving you my tools that I've designed and my frameworks and my systems that I use to be AI native, and selling those or offering them for free or both. Mhmm.
Jordan:In the same direction with the same
Brian Casel:Yeah. Ideas in And and also the in terms of ICP, I always come back to that. We have a extremely different ICP. And I'm leaning back into the people who are, I would say a little bit more technical. Like I went through on a little journey in the last couple of months of like, let's just try to sell to small businesses.
Brian Casel:They're gonna adopt and build their own tools. The dentists, the accountants, the this and that. Like I do attract some of them and they come in and they get value from my courses. But at the end of the day, I still see more of the more tech forward, more AI forward people who just want to connect with other like minded tech AI forward people in the community, and they tend to resonate more with the types of tools and frameworks that I offer. I I'm a big believer now in scratch my own itch type of products.
Brian Casel:So most of the ideas that I'm gonna go after are they're they're born out of my own experience and observation and patterns, And like sometimes they're tools that I'm just doing internally. I have a couple of those. Filterhawk ended up being like, still use it internally, but I'm not selling
Jordan:it. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But then other tools like FlyRight, Mimio, this next one that I'm building, I do see an opportunity for, like, I think that this can resonate with a lot of other AI pilled people. So again, like, I don't know how it's gonna play out product wise and revenue wise, like it it it might be and like, I'm also not on a mission to dominate the world. I'm not and I'm not trying to compete with the big, well funded players. Certainly not trying to compete with the big AI companies themselves. So I'm trying to steer clear of that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm trying
Jordan:to carve among those.
Brian Casel:You you know Yeah. I'm I'm just trying to I'm just trying to carve out very specific use cases. The other thing that I'm thinking about is like pricing and packaging and how I would offer my tools. These are scratch my own itch type of things. So I'm also thinking about an ICP that looks very much like myself or or maybe someone who is sort of like me.
Brian Casel:They're they're very tech AI forward, but maybe they're they don't have the same taste and and and product design chops that I do. So that's why they they would buy a tool rather than completely design it and build it. So so there's that, like, trust factor of, like, mixing, like, Builder Methods Pro audience with, like, listeners of this podcast, followers of my Twitter, readers of my newsletter, like, you just these people who have raised their hand and said, like, okay, I I kinda like to follow along with Brian's taste. And and these types of tools, the Flyrites tend to resonate with like the type of work that they do and that that, you know, that I I get a couple customers on that every week still. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Pricing wise, this is a big unknown, a big question mark for me, But I do think that there is, at least from my personal market, definitely not most markets, I would say, less traditional SaaS models, more downloadable, sell the license type
Jordan:of model.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Download the software, host it yourself.
Justin:Panic.yeah.com,
Brian Casel:Run it run it with your agents. And maybe that looks like a big upfront license to get the software and then maybe like an annual recurring just to have a support thing with my company. Maybe there are little elements of my products that have like a cloud services component and maybe that's a that's a more SaaS like revenue model.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Each individual product is gonna have its own pricing story, I would say. But generally speaking, I I personally tend to lean toward, I think it makes sense for my audience, people like me, they tend to resonate more with a Mimio or a Flyrite, which are both like, you download the thing, you install it, you own it, you can run it with your agents. Yeah. And I got an email from from a long time follower of mine couple days ago, Denny Cave. Denny, if you're listening.
Brian Casel:He said exactly that. He was like, know, I really resonate with the pricing model behind Mimio. It's like a breath of fresh air to see like an email marketing software offers something that's just like, it's not just like a money grab, I'm not trying to do like a goodwill thing here. I am trying to trying to build a business here, but for more technical people, especially today, what I found in my experience with my customers over many years is like, I get a lot of people following me on the podcast and be like, oh, that's a really cool SaaS idea. Good luck with it.
Brian Casel:I'm rooting for you. I hope you can sell it to that market. I'm not gonna buy it, but I hope you can go sell it to that market. You know, like there, I get a lot of people following me who are like that and rightly so because they don't need that bloated hosted one size fits all type of solution. They are more technical.
Justin:I think for your audience for your audience. Yeah. Downloadable buy one software is honestly, Aaron Francis, when he did that too with Solo, it works so well for somebody like you that has a following, that's doing YouTube videos. It's just like, oh, Brian's built this thing. I'm gonna go check it out.
Justin:I pay once. I might get a lot of value out of it. Like, I I I use FlyRight all the time. I use Solo all the time. You know, they they're both kind of in that that world.
Justin:I also think that and this is what's being talked about in the chat right now. And and maybe, Jordan, you can end with this because I you're you're talking about exactly the stuff I've like, we just I just alluded to Brian being like panic.com. Right? One company, multiple products. Thirty Signals, actually, I think they should redo launch this.
Justin:Thirty Seven Signals had Base Camp, High Rise, Campfire. Now they've got Basecamp and Hey. I think we are in an unbundling stage. And the reason I think is that in an AI world, it helps it really helps to have in your mind Basecamp equals project management. Hey is personal email.
Justin:As soon as you make that box too big and vague, you lose that that nice, crisp messaging that's gonna end up in a little AI overview. So what what were you kinda talking about in the in the chat, Jordan?
Jordan:I I was talking about, like, positioning and the danger of of getting into exactly what you just mentioned. We have launched a bunch of features and our hero section and messaging and positioning and our ads have stayed the same. Mhmm. And we are very wary of introducing all the new stuff that we have and going from an AI answering service to an AI front office. Mhmm.
Jordan:With that said, I'm actually gonna run an experiment with that, but it is an experiment. So we are gonna produce ads and a landing page that competes against our wedge positioning. Our wedge positioning right now is we will answer your phone. We are amazing at that. And then you come in and then inside the product, you discover the web chat and the CRM integration, the lead sources, and whatever else.
Jordan:So we are going to experiment before we go take this huge risk, which I think is what that company that I just mentioned and the the one that I alluded to that just raised, that they just went head on assuming, of course, people want more stuff. Of course, we're gonna add more value and therefore, we're gonna grow even more. Mhmm. I'm I'm scared enough, weary enough from the lessons learned there and previous lessons to say, know what we should do? We're just gonna actually compete against ourselves.
Jordan:We're gonna launch ads.
Justin:This reminds me of one of Brian and I's greatest hits was talking about how FreshBooks did exactly this.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah.
Justin:They started this was back in 2000 this is even earlier than this. Mike McDermott was like their old app was getting long in the tooth, they're like, shit. But it's a re a rewrite is a big deal. They started a secret company that competed with FreshBooks. They built the whole thing, had the whole marketing, everything, and Mike says he knew it was time to switch to that as their main product, like, make that FreshBooks when customers started leaving FreshBooks for the competitor that they'd created.
Jordan:I'm in. I'm in. I wanna do it.
Brian Casel:I do wanna mention one So fun. One quick thing. Like, the way that I think about a portfolio, you know, because I know that it's it's not the thing for most founders to to do multiple products. I I know a lot of people are sort of against that, whatever. But, like, the way that I think about it and is, like, for someone like me in my position with some level of, not a huge audience, but I have a connection that I can continue to grow.
Brian Casel:And like having some sort of through line across all the products, like it's absolutely true that like most of my that a lot of people in my audience will not buy every single product that I offer. But it's also true that there are segments in my audience who do buy most, if not all of the products that I offer. And there are just also customers who who buy one or two. And so the way that I see it is I'm I'm here to, you know, help people adopt and change the way that they work with AI through the tools that I design and use myself, and I have my taste behind them. And so if you follow me and and if you like the if you resonate with the kind of stuff that I talk about, like my tools are probably for you.
Brian Casel:And I think about Basecamp, like, especially back in the day when they had Basecamp and High Rise and Campfire and and all of them, like, I I would have to imagine that they had plenty of customers who who did buy all of them because they just liked their taste. Mhmm. And they and they they their products did fill functions in typical businesses that that have those functions. Right? So, like so for
Jordan:me, like to be like them. The love was so strong. I wanna work like them. I wanna buy into that philosophy.
Justin:Dude, it's still working. Like, DHA is convincing people to use Right? Like
Brian Casel:Like, I'm I'm not even sold on the whole Linux idea, but like, man, should I be? Because I'm kind of a fan
Justin:of them. Well, that's
Jordan:that is a unique strength. Well, maybe they're at the very, very top of that game, but you definitely have that with your audience.
Brian Casel:Yes. If I if I look at that, like, and if I evaluate my own products right now, I would say FlyRite is on the right path, although it's a little bit low priced. So I don't know how much pricing power it has. Mimio is what will be priced higher, but it's gonna be a much smaller segment of people who actually resonate with that product. So I don't expect a large uptake there.
Brian Casel:Although, I have some emails in my inbox, so I will get back to you folks who've been emailing me about it. The next one, I think will be a little bit more broad, I I think, and and and layer onto trends, especially around Grokbot. So I'm sort of excited to get that out.
Justin:Can I
Jordan:can I offer some unsolicited advice that I cannot help but form in my mind as I'm listening to this? One of the most successful products that the three of us know on, like, a personal level is Tuple. Yep. Tuple combined a ruthless cloning, copying mentality of a product that was absorbed and sunset with with excellent execution. And that is a deadly combination because you know there's a market.
Jordan:Yep. And if I look at the tubalification of what you're kind of aiming at, Whisper Flow. Perfect example.
Brian Casel:A lot of guys in my space do that.
Jordan:You take you take a very, very popular, insanely fast growing
Brian Casel:It's one I've thought about, for sure.
Jordan:Priced as a SaaS, and you turn it into a one time purchase. And and that's it, baby.
Brian Casel:That's it. I love it. That's it. That I it has definitely crossed my mind to do a voice dictation type of tool.
Jordan:Well, I I think voice dictation maybe you're you're you're past the peak because Whisper Flow is already kind of on its way down and people are already launching. But whatever takes off in the broader market and there's an enormous amount of search for because of that, let them spend a $100,000,000 on their launch video and their ads and their PR campaign, and their conferences, and then just offer for $99. The same goddamn Dude,
Brian Casel:I I literally had a tweet about this maybe a month ago. I was like, all these voice dictation tools, they're trying to do way too much. I just want the thing to let me speak into a box.
Jordan:That's all I They're nuke able, baby. Mhmm. It's not nuke. It's not it's it's the opposite of nuke. You're not attacking them at all.
Jordan:You don't care at There's just so much attention and so much demand. You just come and say, cool. I'll capture the part of the demand that doesn't give a shit about all of your other features, and I'm just gonna do a really great job of this, and it's gonna be priced fairly.
Brian Casel:And and again, I'm also this my my mindset in all of this is like, again, I don't need any one of these products to be an out of the park home run. That would be great if something takes off, but I
Justin:don't, I'm
Brian Casel:not expecting that.
Jordan:No, it's I'm like not
Brian Casel:acquiring that. Your portfolio I'm trying to stack on, and, and also, I, I really like really building builder methods pro around it. So, so for the people who follow me, you can still come into the community and get access or pricing benefits to, to the tools, to sort of like tie it all together and, and then having like the, the cross selling and the and the cross sharing and that sort of stuff. Like, that to me is, like, a fun business to build, you know? Yeah.
Brian Casel:And and it can and I I believe that it can in in a couple of years, that can that can hit the revenue targets that I'm going for, but or or it won't, and it'll suck. But we'll see.
Jordan:Eight eight hundred k years. Okay. Also. Yeah. Gents.
Jordan:Alright. I mean, an hour and forty minutes. These are out of control, but so fun. Yeah. Good to see you all.
Jordan:Thanks everyone for joining us. Until next time.
Justin:You Thanks again.